Opinion: Legal Immigration bill a return to another era

A recent U.S. Senate bill, embraced by President Donald Trump, would slash legal immigration by nearly one half, especially from non-Western countries, and decrease radically the admission of family members of U.S. residents. In addition, the bill grants preference to skilled, educated, and English-speaking immigrants, a significant percentage of them likely white peoples of Western and Central Europe.

Let’s not forget it would turn back the clock nearly a century, to a most unfortunate time in American immigration policy. And it would damage South Carolina's top two industries -- agriculture and tourism -- which rely heavily on immigrant labor.

The proposal is a regrettable throwback, both in intent and content, to the highly restrictive 1921 and 1924 American immigration laws. Such laws slowed immigration dramatically. They favored admitting immigrants from Northern Europe, especially skilled and specialized persons, family members, and agricultural workers. US immigration policy banning almost completely non-Western immigrants remained unchanged until the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act.

Both the 1920s laws and present Senate bill touted by Trump appear intended for a similar audience—Americans who view their nation a white country threatened by minorities and invading hostile immigrants. The bill represents Trump’s latest effort, according to the New York Times, “to stem the flow of newcomers to the US.” He has barred many visitors from select Muslim-majority countries, limited the influx of refugees, increased immigration arrests, and pressed to build a wall along the southern US border.

Trump’s endless talk about immigration, nationality, criminal behavior, and former President Barack Obama, serves as coded language, packaging for many Americans old racial sensibilities into a more acceptable set of ideals and policies. These both reflect and promote among such Americans their anger, fear, and frequent hatred aimed at refugees, immigrants, Muslims, and other minorities.

Similar prejudices against refugees and other racial and/or religious foreigners produced the 1920s laws. During the 1930s America remained closed to persons in Asia, especially Chinese, persecuted by the Japanese. The nearly half million Jews in Nazi Germany—and following March 1938 several hundred thousand more Jews in Nazi-annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia—suffered a similar fate.

By the end of 1938, approximately three hundred thousand Jews had applied for US visas, but the annual American quota for Germany and Austria combined barely reached twenty-seven thousand. But President Franklin Roosevelt arranged to allow a larger number of visas issued. He acted against strong opposition to refugees from the American public. Many considered the president’s policy pro-Jewish.

Stoking anti-Semitism was the Catholic radio priest, Father Charles Coughlin, who railed against both Roosevelt and the Jews. Other notorious anti-Semites, including Henry Ford, the automobile manufacturer; Gerald L.K. Smith, the evangelical fundamentalist preacher; and members of the Ku Klux Klan, associated refugee and other Jews with the Soviet Union and warned of an alleged Jewish-Communist conspiracy to dominate the world.

Moreover, powerful patriotic or military organizations, including the American Legion, as well as some officers in the US Army, thwarted efforts to open America to refugees from Germany. In 1938 an American general caused a scandal for the Army when he suggested publicly that refugees should “all be sterilized before being permitted to embark” for the U.S.

Even the most frantic efforts by Jews to emigrate proved largely fruitless. In May 1939 both Cuba and the US refused to permit the passenger ship, the St. Louis, carrying 900 German Jewish refugees, to dock and unload its desperate human cargo on their shores, and forced the ship to return to Europe. Most of the passengers had to disembark in Belgium and Holland and would die later, along with six million other European Jews, in the Holocaust in World War II.

Also another factor worked against further liberalizing US immigration quotas. The U.S. found itself mired in the world Depression and massive unemployment. Many Americans opposed taking in foreigners who had been stripped of most of their assets by their former country—like Jews in Germany and Nazi-occupied lands—and who might compete for the already few jobs in their new one.

Today, one hears similar reasons for curtailing and changing drastically legal immigration. The results, though on a different scale from the era of World War II, will deprive America of valuable talent and industry.

Donald M. McKale is the Class of 1941 Memorial Professor and professor emeritus of history at Clemson University. Reach him by email: mckaled@clemson.edu.